“As a manager you're paid to be uncomfortable. If you're comfortable, it's a sure sign you're doing things wrong.”

“All earlier pluralist societies destroyed themselves because no one took care of the common good. They abounded in communities but could not sustain community, let alone create it.”

“Once a year ask the boss, "What do I or my people do that helps you to do your job?" and "What do I or my people do that hampers you?"”

“An employer has no business with a man's personality... The task is not to change personality, but to enable a person to achieve and to perform.”

“Most innovators are successful to the extent to which they define risks and confine them.”

“I confess myself utterly at a loss in suggesting particular reforms in our ways of teaching. No discretion that can be lodged with a school-committee, with the overseers or visitors of an academy, of a college, can at all avail to reach these difficulties and perplexities, but they solve themselves when we leave institutions and address individuals.”

“We do not make a world of our own, but fall into institutions already made, and have to accommodate ourselves to them to be useful at all.”

“I think all men know better than they do; know that the institutions we so volubly commend are go-carts and baubles; but they darenot trust their presentiments.”